Guided tour within the exhibition
July 6, 2017 at 6 pm
with Lucia Gregorová Stach

Kozmikomiks presents ideas, stories and new myths. Contemporary artists reveal threads in the unfinished process of research or eclectically create them themselves with the help of philosophy of science, anthropology, as well as para and pseudo-scientific theories and popular literature. Conceptual art and contemporary poetry discover new possibilities on how to use information from science and technology as material for divergent poetic and philosophical deliberations. They also reflect the thinking of contemporary people who find themselves in a post-factual and post-internet world.

The common platform is the theme of Cosmos as the organized totality of existence which is the opposite and antithesis to Chaos. This exhibition offers an interpretation of the relationship of artists to exact natural sciences and technological development with an emphasis on working with material, because its subjectivity counterbalances and at the same time questions the objectivity of scientific research. Cosmos as a combination of visual art and science is a construct of the intellect, but at the same time it provides abundant possibilities for individual spiritual experiences.

The featured artists´ research and gestures from the 1980s up to the present are therefore no superficial celebration of cosmic achievements of mankind, but an exhibition of the constructs of their own universes created according to individual cosmologies. Instead of euphoria for the future they radiate the melancholy and nostalgia of unfulfilled – unfulfillable – desire. References to political subjects, ecology and ethics as the key questions of the future of our Planet and mankind ooze through personal research of the universe, which are of a private up to intimate nature. Sci-fi frequently serves as the catalyst between art and science, because in addition to providing futurological ideas, it also offers many critical instruments for processing the lived reality. The works based on strictly visual effects deal with the theme of escape from existential anxiety in known spacetime and mirror scientific and artistic motifs as psychological phenomena.

The artists in the exhibition are all connected by the idea of the universe as a mental space and state, not an actual place. The exhibition borrowed its name from Italo Calvino’s book Cosmicomics which he wrote between 1963 and 1968 at the height of the Cold War and in the middle of the space race. His series of micro-stories on cosmos offer his own poetic variant of sci-fi as a fantastic alternative to realism, the media boom and information in everyday life.

The cosmos, an almost exclusively male subject of the Neo-avant-garde, is enriched at this exhibition by works from the women’s perspective. The international Kozmikomiks exhibition thus offers the artwork of artists of three generations - the Neo-avant-garde, the middle generation, as well as young and progressive artists.

ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
This project has been supported using public funds provided by Slovak Arts Council.
The project has been also supported by Romanian Cultural Institute in Prague.